Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Which is why it should come as no surprise that popular
culture frequently veers off into left field when it takes up a cause elevating
the inconsequential to the lead on the nightly news.

Outrage over the ridiculous can take on the gravity of SOPA
if you mess with somebody's hero, virtual or otherwise.

So it was with Mass
Effect 3. A sci-fi themed RPG
morality play with elements of an FPS thrown in for good measure. Two years ago
it was a triple-A title from a franchise rivaled only by Call of Duty and Battlefield in
the gaming community.

But a month after its release it became the center of a firestorm
of controversy.

Why? Because fans
didn't like the ending. Bioware, the developer, had made it
abundantly clear that the storyline was coming to close with Mass Effect 3. Meaning that while decisions made during the
game ultimately affected the outcome, that outcome would always lead to the
same conclusion.

But it seems that wasn't enough for fans. Too many loose ends, the hero dying and huge
plot holes you could drive a truck through were too much for them. (sorry if there's any spoilers there)

So why do I bring a tired subject up now, 2 years
later? Well, mostly because Origin had a sale on Mass Effect 3 and I picked it up for $5
a few weeks ago. To me, that was a fair
price and if I was disappointed at least I had the benefit of personal
experience from which to lob my criticisms.

It took me a total of 37 hours over 2 weeks to complete the
single player game. I found it to be
slightly less engaging than Bioware's
other blockbuster, Bioshock, with
characters and gameplay that seemed more mechanical than other Bioware titles I've played. It was more something to get through than to
get excited about.

But that was ok. It
was a game not a life changing event. I
found myself contemplating my actions a bit more carefully after seeing the
effects of an ill considered decision but in the end it wasn't really of any
consequence. You were still going to
fight the "real" bad guys and unless you managed to slight every
conceivable race that could help you, the game was going to end the same.

If I really cared about the story I suppose I'd be
upset. For example at the end of the
game there were races of aliens that were supposedly joining in the effort that
were notably absent when the time came. There
was also scant explanation as to how a safe haven for 35 of my 37 hours had
suddenly turned into a chamber of horrors.

To be honest, I found Bioshock
a better franchise with a more compelling story even when it veered off into
the insane. A lot of the same elements
were there including the grinding boss battles but the story never failed to
support the game. Mass Effect 3 was the
direct opposite with a disjointed story and irrelevant character interactions
frequently getting in the way of the game.

From the perspective of the game and not the narrative,
however, it was still textbook Bioware. You were led down a tightly controlled path
that led you to visually stunning but minimally interactive environments. Then there were technical issues such as the
mannequin-like interactions between you and other NPC's and frequent map
glitches that could get you trapped in scenery.
That could be said for any modern title, however.

I'm not going to get bogged down in specifics though. Mostly because it's just a game (at this
point a $5 game) and as such it lived up to its potential. That being an entertainment medium and not a
personal relationship...

Look, games are just products and as such their only real
function is to entertain. Mass Effect 3 did that better than other
games that weren't trading on their narrative like Battlefield 4. Technically, nothing about the story would
keep your character from advancing on his skill tree or blowing away the waves
of bad guys.

It would just waste your
time dealing with things that didn't save the galaxy.

In fact I would have preferred a more technical and less
narrative experience in Mass Effect 3. There were times when I became annoyed at the
moral and sexual ambiguities of the game.
Yes, I said "sexual" ambiguities.

Let's be honest, if I'm playing a game where I'm supposed to
be saving the whole freaking galaxy do I really need to concern myself with my
love life? Remember, you can sleep with
anyone you want, alienate the aliens and be as saintly or satanic as you want and still get the same ending.

So why are we pandering to sexual orientation?

Maybe this is where the outrage came from. Mass
Effect 3 is full of dead ends and the inclusion of political correctness
may have led players down the path to a false conclusion.

That being that the game is something more than
it actually is.

To be honest, the only game that's really moved me in recent
years was (of all things) a Call of
Duty title and it had nothing to do with whether or not the sarge went
"commando."

It was Call of Duty:
World at War and while I was playing the game I began to feel like I had a
better understanding of what a World War 2 veteran went through in the closing
days of the war. It was full of pain and
grit and moral ambiguity and I loved every minute of it.

That's where a good story improves a good game. I cared about characters that were every bit
as fictional as Mass Effect's but it never got in the way of the core game.

Unlike Mass Effect 3
that had me worrying less about the fate of the universe and more about who
would end up in the captain's cabin for a nightcap.

That's
a fail.

I'll leave you with this.
If the ending of a game is important enough to you to threaten legal
action you may need to reassess your priorities.

Friday, September 5, 2014

Whatever it is, this week Dice published an articleon its Battelog webpage on the topic of cheating in Battlefield 4.

What makes it interesting to me is the timing. Coming almost a week after I posted a video
exposing the ongoing problem of blatant cheats available and prevalent in
Battlefield 4 comes Dice's renewed commitment to combating the practice.

Touting its "FairFight" anti cheating system as
central to its efforts Dice claims to be administering a Heavy Hand to
cheaters.

So what is this "FairFight" all about?

Simply put, it's one part snitch and one part stat
tracking. In other words it's a whole
lot of nothing. It showed up around the
release of Battlefield 4 and was supposed to address the rampant cheating that
was going on largely unhindered in Battlefield 3. FairFight relies on user reports, PunkBuster
Bans (aka: PBBANS) and "unusual" player statistics gathered during gameplay.

One of the improvements in Battlefield 4 over its
predecessor is real time statistics tracking.
Meaning if you get disconnected from a game you still have your unlocks,
kills and other achievements up to that point.
This also allows Dice to monitor gameplay via those same real time
stats.

The theory is that nobody should be able to get say 30 kills
with a sniper rifle in as many seconds without a cheat involved.

Dice has been adamant about the system being largely immune
to false triggering due to the performance of a "skilled" player. Ugh...that
whole "skill" word in the context of video games drives me nuts. Yeah I suppose I'm a "skilled" web
surfer and toilet flusher too.

Anyway the official line is this...

"Our policy on banning cheaters is very strict – we
only ban a player if there’s evidence that he or she is in fact cheating as we
don’t want any false positives. I’m not saying that no evidence = no cheating,
it’s just that we can’t ban anyone if there’s no solid evidence of it. Suspect
players are being monitored a bit closer, and we look for other ways to prove
their guilt." (from the Battlelog article)

Which still doesn't address the real problem with online
multiplayer gaming on PC's and consoles.
That being the very real disconnect between the online host and the
player. It's the same issue that's
caused the failure of cloud gaming services like OnLive except it wasn't lag or
price. Rather it's the layer of
abstraction between what you think is happening and what is actually
happening. Real time gaming isn't
possible over the Internet, there's always a delay and until Terabit
connections happen you can't call it negligible.

As such most online games rely on having as much information
about what's going on preloaded on every client. It lessens the burden on the servers and it's
why you rarely see FPS titles with more than 64 player slots available. It's just too much data to keep track of
which provides the perfect opening for cheats.
All a cheat has to do is expose information that's already present but
normally hidden from a legitimate player.

Unless someone is dumb enough to upload a video bragging
about their exploits to YouTube exposing the hack there's little chance of
getting caught. Meaning we're all on the
honor system. Unless a developer creates
hooks into DirectX that monitor for specific changes to the display output they
can't possibly know about a hack when it's being deployed. That would involve a level of coding that
would be akin to adding a virus scanner into every game's code.

The only thing FairFight does that even comes close is to
monitor certain areas that are considered "off limits "on multiplayer
maps. Off limits is defined as areas
that allow players to hide and slaughter their opponents with impunity. That includes infamous map glitches, "holodeck"
walls you can shoot through and areas that can otherwise give an unfair
advantage. A player that enters these
areas can be banned instantly but remember that we're still not operating in
real time. It's only the local
interaction with the loaded map and not the other players that comes into play
here. You can be sure that every game
"update" will have these areas defined in the local map cache on the
client.

So what's the answer?

FairFight isn't it. I
can't see it as anything more than PR tool.
After all, the cheating industry is a multi-million dollar business
built on circumventing these types of measures.
Reason being, the technology to combat it is too cumbersome and
expensive from both an economic and resource point of view.

Not to mention the uproar that would result from the ever
present eyes of some draconian "Big Brother" watching your every
move.

Meaning we're pretty much stuck with a halfhearted
attempt.

Perhaps the problem really doesn't lie with the developers,
however. Perhaps we just need to
remember that just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.

It's human nature to gain the upper hand but as children
we're often told that cheaters never prosper.
But it all rings hollow in the face of an easy victory doesn't it. I can excuse the 12 year olds in the crowd
but the rest of you, well...

The only fix for cheating is to resist the temptation to do so. If you take your gaming seriously then you
should also take anything that threatens it seriously as well.